Through the rear window: K Narayanan writes on Alfred Hitchcock, 100 years since his first film

Hindustan Times

25-04-2025

* Alfred Hitchcock was born above his father's greengrocer shop in London, in 1899. The third of three children, he was his father's favourite.
* When he was five, his father sent him to the local police station with a note. The policeman on duty read it and locked the boy in a cell for a few minutes, telling him 'This is what we do to naughty boys,' an incident that left him with a lifelong fear of the police.
* His time at London's Jesuit school, St Ignatius College, taught him, he would later say, the power of suspense. It was a school noted for strict discipline. Punishment by caning was common, but was administered only at the end of the day, forcing errant students to spend all day fretting over the pain and humiliation that awaited them. Hitchcock would later say the Jesuits also taught him 'organisation, control and, to some degree, analysis'.
* When his father died in 1914, the 15-year-old found a job at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company, where he was transferred to the advertising department because of his interest in art. He drew designs for advertisements of electric cables.
* It was here that he began to write short stories. A few of these were published in the Henley Telegraph, the company's in-house magazine. Some of these – Gas (1919), The Woman's Part (1919), And There Was No Rainbow (1920) – can be found online, at the Internet Archive.
* A turning point would come in 1919, when Famous Players-Lasky (which would go on to become Paramount Studios) announced it was setting up operations in London and would film Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan there. Hitchcock sent in sample title cards for the film and was hired as a title designer.
* One of the early movies he worked on was the short film Always Tell Your Wife (1923). The director, Hugh Croise, fell ill during filming. So Seymour Hicks, the writer, director and star of the short comedy play it was based on, offered the 'fat youth who was in charge of the property room' a chance to help him direct. Only one reel of the two-reel film is believed to have survived.
* Hitchcock ventured into creative-writing next, and attempted to turn a play – Michael Morton's Woman to Woman – into a screenplay. Michael Balcon, co-founder of Gainsborough Pictures, was renting the Famous Players-Lasky studios at the time, had acquired the movie rights to Woman to Woman, and was looking for a script. When Hitchcock showed them his attempt, they hired him. Hitchcock wrote the script, dialogue and handled art direction as well.
* While working on Woman to Woman, Hitchcock met film editor and secretarial assistant Alma Reville. Now 23, he had, in his own words, 'never been out with a girl in my life. I'd never had a drink in my life.' He mustered up the courage to strike up a conversation with Reville. The two would marry three years later, in 1926..
* Hitchcock worked with Graham Cutts, the director of Woman to Woman, on three other films before Cutts told Balcon he didn't want to work with Hitchcock anymore (it was never clear why). Balcon then offered Hitchcock the role of director on an upcoming Anglo-German production, an adaptation of Oliver Sandys's bestselling novel. The 1925 film received rave reviews from the London press. The Daily Express was probably the first to recognise Hitchcock's abilities, calling him the 'young man with the master mind'.
* The 'first real Hitchcock film', however, is generally considered to be The Lodger (1927). It starred Ivor Novello, one of Britain's most famous actors at the time. It saw Hitchcock use the camera in remarkable ways – photographing a woman's head on a pane of glass, with her blonde hair spread out, lit from behind, to simulate her drowning; using a plate-glass ceiling through which we see the eponymous lodger pacing up and down in his first-floor room, while the family below stare upwards, unnerved.
* Perhaps most notably, it contained a theme — that of the wrongly accused man — that would recur over and over in the moviemaker's films, all the way to Frenzy, in 1972.
* The Lodger was also the first film in which Hitchcock made his trademark cameo appearance. It was, as he called it, a matter of utility. He needed people to fill the screen. Then it became a superstition. Finally, it became an irritant, as people spent more time scanning the screens for his cameo than concentrating on the film. 'I'm very careful to show up in the first five minutes so as to let the people look at the rest of the movie with no further distraction,' he told French filmmaker Francois Truffaut.
* Around this time, he also made The Mountain Eagle (set in Kentucky, shot in Italy and described by him as a disappointment) and The Ring (a boxing film with a love triangle woven in). It is interesting to think that all these were silent films. In fact, Hitchcock would say he considered silent film the 'purest form of filmmaking'.
* His first sound film was Blackmail (1929), featuring the Czech actress Anny Ondra, who was arguably the first Hitchcock blonde, a reference to a certain kind of blonde woman with an icy exterior who hides a passionate core.
* It was Michael Balcon again who gave him a leg up. He offered Hitchcock the opportunity to film a Bulldog Drummond script he had been working on. Unfortunately, the studio eventually failed to acquire rights to the Bulldog Drummond character. The script was then rewritten as The Man Who Knew Too Much. Released in 1934, it was Hitchcock's first big transatlantic hit.
* It was followed by his first great movie, The 39 Steps, a reworking of John Buchan's bestselling novel. The 1935 film was a massive hit. The New York Times used the phrase 'Master of Suspense' in its review. The film was such a hit in London, the police had to be called in to handle the crowds.
* There is a scene in The 39 Steps in which Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll (another Hitchcock blonde) are handcuffed together. This was the first scene shot and, when filming ended, Hitchcock claimed to have lost the key to the cuffs. 'For nearly an hour Madeleine and I shared this enforced companionship, while the hunt for the key was sustained. There was nothing else to do, so we talked of our mutual friends, of our ambitions, and of film matters generally,' Donat would later say. 'Gradually our reserve thawed as we exchanged experiences. When Hitch saw that we were getting along famously, he extracted the 'missing' key from his waistcoat pocket, released us, and said, with a satisfied grin, 'Now that you two know each other we can go ahead.''
* One of the people who watched The 39 Steps in admiration was a young Belgian comic artist named Georges Prosper Remi, better known as Herge. He used the movie as an inspiration for his comic album, The Black Island.
* The filmmaker's next big hit, Young and Innocent (1937), was classic British Hitchcock: fast, funny, with yet another wrongly accused man at the centre. It featured one of his legendary tracking shots, where the camera moves from high above a hotel lounge, through the lobby, the ballroom and bandstand, past the musicians, and ends up focusing on a twitch on the drummer's face.
* 1938 saw the release of The Lady Vanishes, one of Hitchcock's best films. Shot on an 80-ft soundstage, it combined suspense, action, and humour and introduced Charters and Caldicott, two cricket-mad Englishmen played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. The duo would reappear in several other films, most notably Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich. Sample dialogue:
Charters: Bought a copy of Mein Kampf. Appears to me it might shed a spot of light on all this how-do-you-do. Ever read it?
Caldicott (sucking on a pipe): Never had the time.
Charters: I understand they give a copy to all the bridal couples over here.
Caldicott: Why, I don't think it's that sort of book, old man.
* A majority of Hitchcock's films were adaptations of novels or plays or short stories. The author whose stories he adapted most was Daphne du Maurier..
* Off-screen, Hitchcock planned elaborate practical jokes. He planted bottles of wine that exploded, set alarm clocks to go off in the middle of the night and then placed them in actors' beds. If he took guests to a restaurant, he sometimes instructed the staff to be as rude as possible. He once sent half a lorryload of coal to an assistant who kept boasting about his new home-heating system. These jokes could however range on the malicious. When a crew member accepted a bet to stay handcuffed in the studio overnight, Hitchcock slipped a laxative into the man's drink, with predictable results.
* Hitchcock's first film in America, Rebecca (1940), should have been a dream project. It was based on a bestselling Daphne du Maurier novel, and was backed by a producer (David O Selznick) who had made what was then the world's top grossing film (Gone with The Wind; 1939). The cast featured Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson and George Sanders. Rebecca simply could not have missed, and it didn't. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, and won Best Picture and Best Cinematography. But the cuts Selznick insisted on would be the first of many that would haunt Hitchcock.
* His second film in Hollywood was a political thriller. World War 2 had broken out, and he felt deeply uneasy about being in the US while his country was bombarded. The result was Foreign Correspondent (1940), ostensibly based on the memoirs of American journalist Vincent Sheean, but in reality an original script. Hitchcock wanted Gary Cooper, one of the stars of the time, for the lead, but Cooper turned it down because thrillers were seen as 'B-movie material'. The film, starring Joel McCrea, was eventually nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and served as a stirring propaganda film, beseeching the US to enter the war. Years later, Cooper would confess that turning it down had been a mistake.
* Hitchcock also made a romcom while in Hollywood. He directed Mr & Mrs Smith (no relation to the later spy films) as a favour to Carole Lombard. 'Since I really didn't understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was to photograph the scenes as written,' he later said.
* It was while in the US that Hitchcock gave his first public explanation of the plot device that he made famous. Speaking at Columbia University, he said 'we have a name in the studio, and we call it the MacGuffin. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers. We just try to be a little more original.'
* 1943 saw the release of one of Hitchcock's personal favourites, Shadow of a Doubt. It held a special place in his heart because it was written by Thornton Wilder, one of America's leading playwrights. 'In England I'd always had the collaboration of top stars and the finest writers, but in America… I was turned down by many stars and by writers who looked down their noses at the genre I work in,' he said. Wilder's collaboration pleased him tremendously.
* Hitchcock returned to the UK in 1943, where he made two wartime propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache. The only non-English films he ever made, both were in French.
.* He also served as an advisor on the British documentary film, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, which used footage shot by the Allies in 1945. The film was abandoned, restored almost 70 years later, and premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014.
* Other bits of his work remain lost in time. In Spellbound (1945), starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali was chopped by O Selznick, from about 20 minutes to just three.
* His next, Notorious (1946; with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant), had one of the most famous movie kisses. At that time, the Hollywood Production Code stipulated that a kiss couldn't last longer than three seconds. Hitchcock got around this by having Grant and Bergman break off their kisses, speak a line, and continue kissing. The entire sequence lasted 2 minutes and 40 seconds. It was a formula that would be used over and over, across Hollywood.
* Since the MacGuffin in Notorious involved uranium, Hitchcock and scriptwriter Ben Hecht visited Robert Millikan, who was at the time helping American scientists build the atomic bomb. This was in 1944, a year before Hiroshima. Millikan, of course, pooh-poohed the idea of such a weapon. But Hitchcock later learnt that the FBI kept him under surveillance for three months after that visit.
* Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, his first collaboration with Grace Kelly, was his only foray into 3D. He was by now working with Robert Burks, the cinematographer he would collaborate with for the next 13 years..
* Along with Dial M for Murder, 1954 saw the release of Rear Window, starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. Hitchcock modelled the villain after O Selznick, as revenge for his meddling in every film they made together.
* Hitchcock became an American citizen in 1955.
* Also in 1955, he launched the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a crime-horror anthology series. In 1962, it was renamed The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Hitchcock still introduced every episode, but would eventually direct only 17 of the 361 parts.
* In 1958, he released Vertigo. It was met, at the time, with mixed reactions. It did not do well at the box office. Over time, though, it has been recognised as one of Hitchcock's greatest films. Directors such as Martin Scorsese and William Friedkin have referred to it as a masterclass in filmmaking.
* 1959's North by Northwest, meanwhile, has been called the proto-James Bond movie, which is appropriate, because it was based indirectly on a plot cooked up by Ian Fleming, while he was still a secret-service agent. In Operation Mincemeat, as British Intelligence called it, fake top-secret documents were placed alongside a corpse, to be discovered by the enemy. In the film, an ordinary man is mistaken for a spy.
* Hitchcock's next would be his most famous. Psycho (1960) is still the only Hitchcock movie to spawn a franchise. It was based on a novel by pulp-fiction writer Robert Bloch, and shot on a low budget, with a new cinematographer (John L Russell) and a low-cost TV crew..
* Hitchcock cast Tippi Hedren as the main character in his third Daphne du Maurier adaptation, The Birds (1963). The film was a hit, but Hitchcock's obsessive and abusive behaviour towards Hedren, described as bordering on sexual harassment, has since marred his legacy.
* Through all this, Hitchcock never won an individual Oscar. He was nominated for Best Director for Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho. He was knighted, in 1980, months before his death. And he did eventually win the Irving G Thalberg award, handed out during the Oscars, for his contribution to cinema. His acceptance speech was one of the shortest in the ceremony's history. 'Thank you…very much indeed,' he said.